Crushing Strength (1): Melee hits have a +1 modifier when rolling to damage.

Crushing Strength (3): Melee hits have a +3 modifier when rolling to damage.

Elite (if within 6″ of a Warsmith): Whenever the unit rolls to hit or to damage, it can re-roll one of the dice that failed to hit/damage.

Fire Oil: Successful ranged or melee damage from this unit against a unit with Regeneration causes the target unit to lose Regeneration for the rest of the game

Individual: The unit does not have any flank or rear facings.
When shooting against this unit, enemies suffer an additional -1 penalty on their rolls to hit. The unit also has the Nimble special rule.

Inspiring: If the unit or any friendly units within 6″ of it are Routed, the opponent must re-roll that Nerve test.

Piercing (1): All ranged hits inflicted by the unit have a +1 modifier when rolling to damage.

Piercing (2): All ranged hits inflicted by the unit have a +2 modifier when rolling to damage.

Piercing (4): All ranged hits inflicted by the unit have a +4 modifier when rolling to damage.

Piercing Arrow: Roll one of the unit’s ranged attacks separately. This one attack only counts as Piercing (4). Can only be used by normal ranged attacks.

Zap (3): The unit has a ranged attack. You roll (n) dice for this ranged attack rather than using the Attacks value of the unit. This attack has a range of 24â€³, always hits on 4+ (regardless of modifiers) and is Piercing (1).

Of those two, the most annoying was by far the most recent ThinkPad. For years considered the best machine for desktop GNU/Linux, ThinkPads are actually getting pretty bad. Its now hard to find a ThinkPad with an Atheros wireless card and Intel graphics, its even harder if you want a machine you can change the battery on.

I found a few companies who sell machines preloaded with GNU/Linux, and sadly many of those machines don’t have this problem fixed either. I was delighted to discover that you can actually configure and build your own laptop online — there are a few companies that offer this, I went with AVA Direct because they offered the most choice of configurations, offered to install Debian on the laptop.

Twenty years ago today, my friend Jonathan Nadeau was in a car accident and lost his sight, permanently. Jonathan is now a free software activist, who through his non-profit organization, the Accessible Computing Foundation, has released the first version of Sonar GNU/Linux, a custom version of Ubuntu with blind users in mind.

I’ve been busy with a contracting gig — a new role for me, doing a mixture of sysadmin and development work. Mostly sysadmin work right now, as I attempt to tune a large authenticated Drupal instance and eventually migrate it to a new Drupal release.

I’m doing a lot of work with RT, Nginx, Varnish, ikiwiki and Xen, many of which I’ve used before in various places.